Value Proposition
- Do you have a development environment which consists of an arsenal of separate development tools and a mix of disparate methods and practices that leaves you with no choice but to duplicate project data in multiple tools and in different representations? The multitude of disparate and disconnected tools and methodologies in every business enterprise and systems engineering environment is a reality today.
- Are you faced with report generation constraints that can simply not be met with Enterprise Architect's standard RTF generator?
- Do you need to import and/or export model data in a format that is not supported by the tool?
- Did you try to import a large library of Visio diagrams into EA and discovered that the free Visio importer provided by Sparx does not meet your expectations?
- Would you like the tool to validate your models based on your own rules and criteria?
These, and many other scenarios, are examples where our expertise in extending the Enterprise Architect tool can provide you tremendous value.
Cephas offers you the ability to augment the behavior of the Enterprise Architect (EA) tool with either pre-built or made-to-order extensions to better support your unique work practices and development environment. We invite you to explore the cost and time saving opportunities resulting from such customizations!
Tool Extension Scenarios
Documentation Generation
The format that certain documents must have, for example to meet legal specifications, can be so exacting that the RTF generator included in EA simply can not do the job. Sometimes it is not the format that causes the problem but the content, specifically where one or more levels of relationships need to be traversed to qualify elements for inclusion in the report.
Integration with Third-party Tools
Your EA models may have touch points with other artifacts throughout the development lifecycle, such as requirements, test cases, source code, and documentation, that are maintained in separate tools or environments. For example, in order for you to efficiently work on the same set of project requirements both in EA and within your requirements management tool, you must have a seamless way to ‘synchronize’ the requirements between the two environments (an example of this is the integration between EA and DOORS, offered by Sparx System). This data interchange requires that either both tools are actively integrated with one another, or that the data can be exchanged in a format that is understood on either side.
Model Validation
Many clients have specific requirements for model validation, either to enforce better compliance with the official notation than what Sparx checks by default, or more often to enforce business and/or technical domain compliance rules. We have built such validation engines many times and have an existing framework in place from which we can quickly generate your specific rule sets. An example of such a validation add-in is the BPMN 2.0 Validation extension that we offer for free to all Enterprise Architect Users!
Next Step
Our many years of experience in extending the base EA functionality as per our client's specifications should make you feel comfortable in outsourcing to us the development and support of these extensions. Take advantage of this opportunity to better leverage the EA tool while keeping your developers focused on their domain related tasks.
What Does Extending EA Entail?
An extension (also called an add-in) comes in the form of a DLL, conformant to the specifications defined by Sparx Systems, that is loaded by Enterprise Architect on startup.
The add-in can register interest in many different events published by EA while a User is at work in the tool. In addition the capabilities of the extension can be presented to the User in the form of (context sensitive) menu entries.
Extensions are easy to install and seamless to maintain. Since the extension mechanism is fully specified by Sparx Systems via its Automation Interface, there is no concern about maintaining compatibility between different versions of EA or losing vendor support!
Free Extensions!
Cephas offers a number of FREE extensions to its loyal customers. Please check out or Special Offers page!
Available Extension-based Products and Services
- A Viewpoint-to-Viewpoint transformation service that converts any Viewpoint (i.e. diagram) into another Viewpoint, within the same notation or across notations!
- A Visio-to-BPMN conversion service.
- An XPDL-to-BPMN conversion service.
- A rule-based UML® Architecture Validation extension.
- A System Architecture Modeling (UML® Deployment diagram) extension.
- A rule-based System (SysML®) Architecture Validation extension.
- A BPMN™ Model Integrity extension.
- A SABSA® Security Architecture Validation extension.
Related Topics
Extension Request Form
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